Tucked among the coupons and credit card offers asking Americans to bare their financial souls, 98 million pieces of no less invasive–but much more critical–mail will appear this week in mailboxes nationwide bearing an official seal: Census 2000.
Enclosed is a yellow-and-white census questionnaire, the venerable and oddly retro demographic tool intended to record every person in the United States, along with their race, age and where and how they live.
The answers to these questions will be digested by the government and become the basis on which public dollars and political representation are divided for the next decade. Yet in a nod to the changing nation it aims to capture, this year’s count features new twists, including a more nuanced–and some say, baffling–classification of race and an expanded effort to penetrate historically undercounted communities.
“What it really points to is that the government sees the census as an identifier of emerging needs and a way to respond to those needs,” said Terri Ann Lownethal, a Washington-based census consultant and former staff director of the U.S. House Census Oversight Committee.
The changes have not been without controversy. Some wonder whether the new race classifications will dilute the picture of minority groups. Others ask why their language is not included on the list of five –Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Korean–which, for the first time, will have census questionnaires of their own.
For most Americans, the process of counting will begin and end this week, when they receive the so-called short form in their mail, asking them seven questions about their household that require roughly 10 minutes to complete.
One in six households will confront a longer form, with 52 detailed questions that ask, among other things: Do you ride a ferryboat or streetcar to work? Did you serve in the Persian Gulf War? And on how many acres does your mobile home sit?
Officials expect about 40 percent of the public will fail to return their forms by the April 1 deadline. To count them, the bureau will dispatch roughly 500,000 clipboard-bearing enumerators nationwide beginning in mid-April.
“What we’re hoping, of course, is that we won’t need all of them” said Stanley Moore, Chicago’s regional census director. “But that is up to everyone. Do they mail it back or not.”
However people get counted, there are some questions that promise to puzzle even the most forthcoming respondents.
One question, for example, asks for ancestry but doesn’t define it. Does it refer to parents, grandparents or great-grandparents? Neil Tillman, acting chief of Census 2000 media relations, conceded that there are no hard and fast rules. “Whichever feels most accurate,” he said.
Another question asks whether the person speaks a language other than English at home, but it is unclear whether that means in addition to English, or instead of English.
“If you speak it, put it down,” Tillman said. “There are other questions designed to assess how well you speak English.”
In the past, many ethnic groups and minorities complained that the choices offered on the census form to define race and ethnic background were too limited. So this census offers 14 different categories and subsets, which could lead to 63 different mixed-race combinations.
Census officials only expect about 2 percent of respondents to mark more than one box, but immigrant and minority advocates are split over the issue. Many praise the change as a nod to the country’s evolving face. Others fear that by spreading the minority population among so many classifications, the census will effectively under-represent all of them. Those figures are critical for redrawing legislative districts and enforcing civil rights laws on voting and discrimination.
In an effort to calm the debate, the Office of Management and Budget last week offered a directive on the subject, but some civil rights groups say it raised more questions than it answered.
According to the directive, people who classify themselves as a white-minority mixed race will be counted as minorities when the government uses the data for Voting Rights Act enforcement and other civil rights uses.
“It’s a good start, but it leaves unanswered how it’s going to work in practice, especially when it comes to civil rights litigation,” said Karen Narasaki, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.
Some ethnic groups, including the Polish community in Chicago, have voiced concerns about how the bureau determined the languages that now have their own questionnaires.
“It’s definitely a problem, because we have a large Polish-speaking population in our ward,” said Ald. Michael Wojcik (30th).
Census officials say the decision was based not simply on the size of the ethnic group, but on a demographic analysis of which populations are most “linguistically isolated.”
“It’s true, of course, that there is a large Polish-speaking population, but they, traditionally have not been a hard group to enumerate,” Tillman said.
People with census questions are encouraged to call 800-471-9424, or check the census Web site at www.census.gov.
